Geographical Information Systems Explained

What is GIS?

Definition: A Geographic Information System (GIS), also known as a geographical information system or geospatial information system, is any system for capturing, storing, analyzing, managing and presenting data and associated attributes which are spatially referenced to Earth. [ Wikipaedia ]

Sources of data are vast (i.e. weather bureaus, NASA, municipalities, etc.) and the combination of sources often leads to more revealing and descriptive data analysis via spatial modelling and statistical methods. Given the availability of GIS components and that 80% of data can be geographically referenced, building your own GIS represents an increasingly viable and useful Management Information System (MIS) across manyapplications.

3 Responses to “What is GIS?”

Hi I’m a fan of your Geohash but I have a simple idea to sotehrn the code further and thus make it easy to remember the problem is that your base location is the world and thus your starting point is too wide an area.For day to day use it can be a much smaller hash for example I am in Ireland which means i am within an area thats probably a range of 4 degrees of longitude and 6 degree’s of latitude. This is a much smaller area to define. Thus knowing Im in ireland you can refine the geohash and assume the initial significant figures and then use a shorter string and be as accurate.So what I’m suggesting is you can prepare look up tables for each country or state and then prepare a geohash minus the offsets for that country. obviously you could go further and define area’s even smaller.probably the easiest way to define a country area is to define an area as something like ireland is a country contained within a bounding box of between 50 and 54 degrees north and between 5 and 9 degrees west. and the base offset would be 50 north and 5 west.

There are actually sraeevl papers about how social network analysis is being used to find OBL and how to explain the key players during 9/11.The biggest source of the exaggeration on Numb3rs involves small sample sizes.